


Glitches

by orrisrootroom



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: C.S. Lewis' Joy, Canon-Typical Treatment of Christianity as Mythology, Comedy, Horror, Involuntary memory, OP Hastur, Other, just for fun, rule of cool/unserious world building, world-building porn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-01 21:35:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20905946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orrisrootroom/pseuds/orrisrootroom
Summary: When Hastur suspects Crowley holds the key to a secret of great importance for the coming War, Crowley has to find a way to divert his investigation. Crowley summarizes Hell's FAQ on crushes, Aziraphale has a different theory, and cosmic horror gets shoe-horned into the GO universe.





	1. Chapter 1

1\. 

When Hastur asked (almost plaintively) whether Crowley could stay a moment after his presentation, the room emptied quickly. Other demons skittered off with expressions ranging from malign joy to cautious pity.

It was rumored that during the Glorious Rebellion Hastur had cut his way up to the true tabernacle (of which the one on Earth was a simplified copy), and then - insanely - entered it. Supposedly he'd made it, unharmed, all the way to a room before the innermost sanctum. There he'd seen a numinous darkness which realigned his eyes and mind so very little remained to cope with ordinary matters in Hell or on Earth. For this reason, and because certain proportions of the true tabernacle remained burned in his mind, Hastur spent most of his time in regions of deep Hell which Crowley gladly never visited, working out strange engines and advantages for the coming conflict.

Whether or not this story was true, Crowely had seen rather little of Hastur since the Fall. But recently Crowley had been unpleasantly surprised to find him starting to turn up sporadically at meetings. 

Crowley had personally seen Hastur eat a few faces, in moments of sudden shrieking fear and hate which even Duke Ligur didn't seem to be able to anticipate (for better or worse, the demons usually survived). But, perhaps because Crowley was rather good in a fight and too valuable an agent to be permanently damaged, he was almost equally unsettled by Hastur's normal behavior: a ghoulish parody of an old man's whimsy and wittering geniality mixed with a child's curiosity and simple emotions. 

Earthly mystics liked to tell a story about people living shackled in a cave, seeing only shadows on the cave wall. In this story, a brave soul made her way out of the cave and inspected objects directly in full sunlight, only to be pitied for a blind bat and a simpleton when she returned to free her fellows because her eyes were no longer adjusted to easily discern shadows. Humans seemed to find the eery possibilities evoked by this fable lovely and inspiring, but they gave Crowley chills. 

Now he stood before the embodiment of that horror. This bundle of white maggots which had oozed up from lower hell and wrapped itself in a trench coat, this former angel who might have seen more of the Ineffable Plan than any created being and emerged from the experience shrieking with inscrutable fear, naïveté, whimsy and malice, was holding the door for him and watching him steadily with those terrible all-pupil eyes glittering like strange constellations.

2.

With effort Crowley slithered past Hastur into the little office, and then closed his own eyes for a moment and tried to get a grip. There was no need to panic. Slowly the cocky yuppy part of his personality, which Crowley had long cultivated, started putting forth fresh green sprouts and reviving. He'd talked his way out of worse situations before. Really, who knew what that monster wanted? Maybe Crowley wasn't even in trouble. And, hey, the harsh antiseptic, moldy, chemical smell of the conference room certainly did wonders for Hastur's odor.

Crowley tried to think of something jaunty and superficially collegial to say to show he wasn't afraid. Hadn't he recently helped publish self-help best sellers _Be the Alpha in the Office_ and _10 Ways to Establish Dominance in the Boardroom_? But when he opened his eyes he somewhat quailed.

Hastur had unselfconsciously seated himself _on_ the office's desk, rather than behind it. So he was far closer than Crowley had expected, maybe half a meter away. And those massive jet black pupils had apparently been staring solidly at Crowley this whole time.

Although no physical threat seemed to be intended (yet), Crowely was almost trapped against the wall. He looked up from Hastur's human-ish eyes to to the cold frog eyes above them, with some vague thought of making himself more comfortable. This second pair of eyes swiveled to meet his gaze and then blinked slowly, out of rhythm with the human eyes, in a way that Crowley did not feel was an improvement. 

Now all four eyes looked softly at Crowley, with an expression of abstract but dangerous curiosity. 

"It's like there's a word on the tip of my tongue," said Hastur slowly.

3.

"There's something to do with you.... something important I don't understand," Hastur continued almost in a whisper.

He tilted his head to the side wonderingly, looking like a large unkempt white bird. Then he raised a hand to the side of Crowley's face, hovering just a centimeter or two away so Crowley nervously expected one of those corpse-cold fingers to accidentally touch him. For a moment Hastur looked almost tenderly ...at Crowley? No through him, up and a little to the left.

Then Crowley was hit full force with a blast of wordless demonic interrogation. He felt like he was falling into those terrible wet black eyes, and then like he was floating somewhere inside them. The claustrophobic office disappeared.

At first this floating in darkness recalled the depths of space, with emptiness deeply around him in almost every direction. It reminded him, in a melancholy way, of when he'd set out to help construct the outer cosmos. Now he had nothing of the excitement, camaraderie and purpose he'd felt then.

But gradually, stretching his inhuman senses out to their utmost limits, Crowley discerned that what he'd thought was empty space was actually the mouth of a massive tunnel. And he wasn't floating in a void. Rather there was a soft wind all around him, pulling him slowly slowly slowly in and towards something at the unfathomably distant end of that tunnel. 

This was a nasty shock. Crowley had a decent chance of taking Hastur - the part of Hastur he'd known and interacted with - in a fight. But now that the _Most_ of Hastur was taking an interest, was turning its attention to Crowley insofar as it was capable of that, there was a great difference in power.

Crowley tried, and utterly failed, to break the link between their minds. Then -- while trapped in that dark space -- he felt something like fingers inside him. Something blunt and clumsy was groping through his soul, like a shaking hand searching for a lost locket buried in soft wet soil. And then that probing hand brushed past something, and Crowley realized he needed to break the link immediately, at almost any cost.

A powerful demon could actually consume a sufficiently weaker one, incorporating the weaker one's mind and consciousness, so that they lived on inside the ruling mind in a nightmarish way. Crowley wasn't afraid of that, unless the Lower Management had massively changed its policies and attitude towards him.

What frightened him was realizing that, the longer Hastur spent rummaging about in his soul for whatever clue to some horrible mystic crossword puzzle he thought he could find there, the likelier it was that he'd come across a small hidden part of Crowley which hadn't been changed at all during his Fall. Crowley's most incriminating memories of the Arrangement were stored here for safe keeping. But even if (as Crowley hoped) the thing at the end of the tunnel wouldn't care enough to inspect those in detail, a serious problem remained.

Crowley didn't like when anyone alluded to this small core of love, gentleness and disinterested curiosity which had remained aloof from both Hell and Heaven. But now it seemed to Crowley (perhaps exaggerating things in his fear), that this core was the only thing he fully recognized as himself, and that losing it would be a kind of death. It might, actually, be worse than death.

For Crowley suspected that if Hastur found this little core, he wouldn't attack or report him for some kind of misconduct or treason. He would simply reach those clumsy probing fingers down around it as deeply as possible and then snap it off, like a farmer clearing out the last remaining root of from a tree which has otherwise rotted away, if she comes across it while tilling the soil. And what might life be like after that? There could be a literal eternity of consciousness of the itching wound. He might retain confused memories of having once been more than a vortex of rage, pain, fear, loss and selfish brutal hunger, and yet be unable to even imagine other feelings. The dreamlike sense of having had and lost something of unknown but terrible importance might tease and whisper at him forever. 

So Crowley had to get Hastur out of his head immediately. He had to deflect Hastur's investigation at almost any cost. It was very hard to think. Nothing came close to guaranteeing success. Still, he came up with a plan. 

"Actually," Crowley said, trying to tinge his voice with brash confidence (though he couldn't tell whether he was speaking aloud or directly into Hastur's mind), "I think I know what you're looking for."

Hastur grunted and Crowley was relieved to find himself suddenly back in office. Now all he could do was try his best to sell the story he'd thought of. 

"So first" said Crowley, groping at the ledge behind him and trying to find a dry-erase marker, "how much do you know about the different emotions associated with sexual love and their Spiritually Useful role in the human condition?" 

Hastur just looked at him balefully.

Crowley continued, "Well, let me give you the executive summary."

4.

Reading a fairly promising ratio of suspicion to curiosity on Hastur's face, Crowley started setting up the big lie he needed to sell. Unfortunately, he had only a sketchy memory of the presentation he was about to summarize. 

In general, infernal training sessions had a special mixture of tedium, pointlessness and simmering multi-century office politics which any sane being would try to forget as soon as possible. And the this presentation had had an especially strong and depressing flavor of Hell's propaganda about Heaven's propaganda echoing back and forth forever. The taxonomy part of it to had been compiled by a ball of perpetually oozing eyes who Crowley was fairly sure couldn't tell a man from a manatee. 

Still, Hastur probably knew even less about the subject at hand than that ball of eyes. And Crowley did remember this one infographic. First he drew a ladder on the whiteboard, with a list of phrases running up and down vertically. Then he wrote "Involuntary Memory" in one corner, and "Eros" about the ladder. 

"So, what is Eros to us?" Crowley began "Well, let's start with something simpler: Involuntary Memory. Humans were made to live in paradise, ~in loving unity with God~, right? So She built their minds to fill out ambiguous information with a bias towards what would be most likely be true in that situation. Then, after the expulsion from Eden, she added a bunch of overrides to make their minds work better in their new condition. So now, for example, a human brain will interpret gappy visual information that's ambiguous between, say, a coiled vine and a snake, as showing a snake."

"But", Crowley continued, "for some reason, the overrides on memory are glitchy -- especially when a memory is triggered by smell. So fairly often a human will, say, smell their long dead great aunt's favorite lime tea, or a brand of insect repellent they'd used in summer camp and get hit about 1.2 seconds of intense multi-sensory `recall', where some perfectly ordinary part of their past returns in great detail and seems intensely and inexplicably more beautiful, real, painfully desirable and important than anything else. Humans mostly shrug it off."

"Eros is basically the same deal, except it's less intense, lasts longer and humans take it very seriously. Also we don't know as much about what triggers the glitches. You could probably ask the boffins on floor -342 for the latest," Crowley continued, wistfully hoping that Hastur would. On his own single visit, the staff there had displayed about the same inclinations towards face eating as present company, but much greater problems with concision.

5.

"So as you've probably guessed, this winds up giving us loads of different possibilities for temptation."

"For example, here," Crowley said, pointing near the middle of the whiteboard and speaking with the resolute cheerfulness of an introductory foreign language instructor, "you have garden variety adulteries and desertions."

"But if we walk up the chart," he said, cocking a finger and suiting actions to words, "we gradually shade into idolatry, and you get your traitors who consider passing intelligence to a murderous regime a mere footnote in their grand romance with a misunderstood spy, and passive partners in murder duos and early joiners in cults and stuff like that". 

"And then, even higher, we have some silly blasphemers who treat Religion as a means to some #Aesthetic." Crowley didn't pronounce the `#', but hoped it would come across from his inflection until he remembered his audience. "You get your 1890s type aesthetes thinking about converting to Catholicism in the mellow incense scented gloom of a cathedral, and your 1960s LSD enthusiasts who think they've just made a major discovery about about Buddhism and your atheists congratulating themselves for being broadminded and curious while reading up on their favorite supersized creepypasta[1]."

Crowley paused to see how this was going over. At some point Hastur pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and written down the words "kindergarten" and "LSD", "supersized" and "creepypasta". His pen was leaking little gobs of blue ink onto the paper and his coat and his hand. He seemed interested though. Less suspicious. Smooth sailing so far. Crowley unwisely decided to speed through the rest of the presentation.

"On the other hand, going down the chart, we can very gradually dial back the elements of sweetness and light to get, umm..." said Crowley, waving his hand to indicate about ten entries and failing to think of something unified to say about them. "Well, there's an element of vulnerability which can be good for stirring up self-loathing and rage.... And did you know you can get Eros experiences where the beauty-and-wonder elements are almost undetectable, but the craving and pleasure remain at almost full strength?"

He could feel himself flailing both physically and verbally, loosing credibility every second, "Right. So, yeah, basically an expense of spirit ... in a waste of shame. Is what we have here in this part of the chart."

Fuck. He needed to pull things together. Luckily he remembered what that perpetually oozing ball of eyes (Crowley could never remember his name) said about the last item fairly well. Maybe he could even come up with a joke. Hastur hated jokes. It might help keep him off balance. 

"Finally, at the bottom, we get some of the most valuable and purely infernal states possible, like your Victorian newspaper reader's enjoyment of some panting journalism about `fallen women' with a hope that both the sin and the suffering were underplayed. By this point we've got only the slightest tinge of the erotic mixed in with other less pleasant emotions. But it's an active ingredient. It contributes just enough freshness and pleasure to help keep them coming back." 

"After all," said Crowley, trying his best and wishing he'd come up with something more stylish, "you can't expect people to slut shame _pro bono_." 

Well, this was it. For good measure, Crowley tried to rearrange his limbs from their current posture of `trying to defend valued parts of one's soul from a cosmic horror via unprepared public speaking' into more of a confident and sexy slouch.

He intensely wished that he'd thought of a different plan. But unfortunately he only knew one secret which the Rest of Hastur could conceivably be interested in. 


	2. Chapter 2

Well, this was it. For good measure, Crowely tried to rearrange his limbs from their current posture of `trying to defend valued parts of one's soul from a cosmic horror via underprepared public speaking' into more of a confident and sexy slouch. He intensely wished that he'd thought of a different plan. But unfortunately he only knew one secret which the Most of Hastur could conceivably be interested in. The secret was this.

The standard model of Eros and Involuntary Memory (which Crowley had just been explaining) implied that only humans should be able to experience those feelings as striking novelties. Angels shouldn't be able to perceive Eros as an increase of joy. For, despite the Silence, they were supposed to already be living in paradise ~ in perfect loving unity with God ~. And demons, who could (more or less) remember that state shouldn't be unduly bewildered by reminders of it. 

But Crowley knew (as only a handful of other beings in Heaven or Hell did), that the standard model had to be wrong. He knew, to his joy and sorrow, that it was wrong in his case. And he strongly suspected - with a hopeless sweetness that inspired the first real sparks of zeal against Heaven he'd felt in millennia- that it was wrong in the case of angels as well. 

What this meant in the grand scheme of things, he wasn't sure.

\---

Once he'd actually tried, very cagily, amid a century's correspondence about other things, to ask Aziraphale's opinion.

At first Crowley hadn't sure he'd been understood. For his old friend said nothing about the subject in his next letter. He'd only sent him a book with a tissue-thin bookmark at Keats' speculations that the world was not a `vale of sorrows' but a `vale of soul making'. Mere sparks of consciousness and intelligence become `souls' when they grow into distinct personalities. And a world like ours where, "the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways'' was needed for this process.

But when they next met in person, Aziraphale brought the matter up unprompted. The former gave a little self-conscious cough that somehow flooded Crowley's heart, mind and loins with instantaneous conviction that _at the very least_ his question had been understood.

"It might be," Aziraphale had said nervously, but with enthusiasm in his eyes , "that we're all still children." How different this shyness was from Aziraphale's usual smug serenity when speaking as a mouthpiece for his side! Crowley still remembered the chill he'd felt at hearing this new tone.

Now Crowley gravely doubted his grasp of the infernally- no, worse, terrestrially - convoluted system of codes and allusions they'd used to conduct the conversation that followed. And he also wasn't sure that Aziraphale had anything very definite or coherent in mind. But he thought Aziraphale had, basically, suggested this.

The human world and the larger cosmos they knew were _both_ only vales of soulmaking. You had the humans' realm, with its amoral physical laws and lovingly detailed divine hiddenness, on one hand. And you had the celestial one, with a conflict at even odds between firms labeled "good" and "evil" and lengthening divine silence, on the other. (Well, Aziraphale certainly hadn't put the latter part so bluntly). 

Each realm might be just a sort of (gruesome) playground for the application of free will to meaningful choices, and a chance to "feel and suffer in a thousand different ways." And something very different might be planned for after this round of solitaire was done -- after their personalities had finished cooking or whatever.

If so, then the deepest structures of human and angelic minds might _both_ have been designed for a very different life than this one, and both might equally suffer glitches which revealed those deep structures.

Now, obviously this 'necessary veil of soul-making' hypothesis was toadying, sentimental, horseshit.

To put things mildly (and with 6,000 years of examples to choose from this was putting things very mildly indeed), watching your family shit themselves to death from dysentery, getting served up 80 years of untreatable major depression along with your share of human condition and choosing between death and murderous cannibalism in a famine just _really weren't like_ going on a road trip to "find yourself" or writing a novel without the letter e, or going through an indie rock phase. Creating a world like this one as some kind of fucking kindergarten for the soul (specifically, for those souls who passed Her exam rather than being tested to destruction) would be as grotesquely ruthless as stocking a children's game with real weapons and live ammunition.

But that didn't mean it wasn't _the kind_ of toadying, sentimental horseshit Aziraphale would go in for. And there were possibly refinements to the thing Crowley hadn't thought of. Crowley had wanted to ask many questions, and had been on the verge of doing so.

But then humiliatingly, infuriatingly, in the mere joy of this apparent new understanding ... Ugh, from mere pitiful excitement at feeling they were -finally- whispering together like children at a slumber party about the vast surrounding darkness, he'd overestimated his position. And now, well. However much the rift which followed had healed, he was blessed sure he wouldn't be the first to re-raise the question. So he might never know exactly what Aziraphale had guessed in 1862, or what he might have quietly thought thereafter.

\---

Returning to the present, all that mattered now was this. There was a window which could (in principle) be cleansed and opened in almost any of their kind. Earth's variety and change just turned out to be better at accidentally opening it than the purer and more stagnant atmospheres of Heaven and Hell.

Crowley could open that window. It was impossible to know just what would happen if he did. But with luck and...management, the result would be sufficiently unexpected to pass for the missing clue Hastur's mystic crossword puzzle, and buy Crowley time to get back to Earth. 

With even more luck (that is to say, far more luck than Crowley usually had), doing something officially maintained to be impossible would be intimidating enough to block further inquiries. Or Hastur would suddenly and mysteriously forget about the whole thing, as sometimes happened. Fuck, for all Crowley knew or cared (if his whole quest weren't superstition or insanity) this might actually be the answer that Hastur was looking for. At the very least, moving the fight to Earth should give him better odds. 

Crowley gave it a go. "So, erm... Eros is a powerful and versatile tool of corruption, which might have unrecognized significance" Crowley said to Hastur, who was now half sitting on, half leaning against the desk. "And it's a weakness that our lot can't access the experience. Perhaps that's the clue you've been sensing. But if you promise not to come after my sources," he continued (materializing a contract with the names of some of the occult organizations he'd least mind having incinerated) "I'll ... sort you out." 

Crowley had originally intended to demand some kind of payment, if only not to raise suspicion. But, just as he was starting to name a price, his mind wandered from the bright curious expression in Hastur's eyes to the unholy abyss he'd so recently felt pinning and probing and whispering to him from inside that cold pile of maggots, and he shut his mouth. No one could be expected to haggle.

A long silence stretched out.

Crowley's heart would have raced if it had been sufficiently in the habit of mirroring the human organism. He prepared to find himself flung back into that crawling darkness.

"Thank you," Hastur finally said, with a frail smile that somehow made Crowley feel he'd just had a very close call. Hastur whimsically signed the offered card with the leaking ballpoint pen, which now produced precise strokes of occult fire. 

Then he extended a corpse-cold hand, palm up. 

Crowley cautiously reached out to touch that palm. Finding the part of Hastur's mind he needed would be like hiking through ice and barbed wire. And when he got there, the window he had to open might be covered in slick cold ice, or rusted impassibly shut or worse gloatingly terribly Occupied. Still, there was nothing for it but to go in.

**Author's Note:**

> 1 I had to put myself in the picture. :)[return to text]


End file.
